D’oh, a deer: Capturing the video and missing the parenting moment

Perhaps I watched “Footloose” too many times in the 1980s and 1990s, but I anticipated that my biggest parenting struggles would involve knock-down-drag-out battles between myself and my kids. Even when I still was a child I knew I wouldn’t be the cool dad who just lets stuff go. I would have a hard ass James Evans side, or more likely a grumbly nagging streak like the father in “Breaking Away.”

Looking back after nine years of parenting, my No. 1 struggle by far has been with myself. Holding my temper in check. Managing work and other obligations to make time for my kids. And making sure I don’t get preoccupied with capturing the memory, and end up missing the moment altogether.

The last one was the biggest surprise, and a parenting problem new to the last two generations. I can’t imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder, for example, making charcoal drawings of her kids’ birthday parties, and later realizing she wasn’t fully checked in to the moment. Better camera technology and smart phones have allowed us to easily document our kids’ lives. Nowhere in the instructions does it warn that pointing your iPhone 5 at every childhood milestone will seriously dilute your participation in the event.

My journey toward enlightenment in this area has two milestones:

Lesson #1 came on our last trip to Disneyland, two and a half years ago, which coincided with my first month with a smart phone.

The vacation started with a video camera — we surprised the kids by picking them up after school, and documented their increased confusion/frustration in the back of the car as we made our way down Interstate 5 toward destinations unknown instead of going home. (I don’t regret that time investment. The video is excellent.)

Once we were inside the park, I spent way too much time taking photos, updating our travels on Twitter and even writing a blog post or two. I repeated my mantra since starting The Poop: That documenting my kids’ lives would pay off when they get older. But at the end of our travels I already had hazy recollections, like I had watched someone’s home video of the trip, not quite experiencing it myself. It was the cherished vacation memory equivalent of having a really good workout, and then sabotaging it by eating a bag of Circus Animal cookies.

Lesson #2 involved a deer.

I’m not particularly religious, but human/deer interaction already has a weird/mystical/fleeting vibe. The world kind of stops when you see a deer, and the animal seems to be telling you something really important.

Amplify this by the fact that I was on a hike with my then 4-year-old son. And amplify it again because we were in Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland, a WPA-built network of staircases, fountains, cascading waterfalls, empty stone planters and walking trails in varying states of abandonment. It looks post-apocalyptic, in the best possible way.

We were walking high up on the stone stairway, near the Woodminster Theater, when I saw movement on the other side of the man-made creek. Before I could do any more than make out the shape of the deer, I lifted up my smart phone, and clumsily tried to get the camera working. By the time the viewfinder appeared, I looked at the screen and the deer was gone. I stared at the phone slightly dejected, like that greedy dog in that fable who lost both of his bones.

(I have more questions, of course. Was the deer ever there at all? Which one of my dead relatives had been reincarnated into the deer? Did Charles Dickens send the animal as some kind of “Christmas Carol”-style warning from the ghost of parenting future? “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change …”)

In any case, that was a turning point for me. I’ve refused to delete the photo of the non-deer, keeping it as a reminder to put down my phone. I say that to myself sometimes, while at a playground or on a train ride or even during birthday parties and school concerts. “Put down the @#$&ing phone, Peter.”

Of course it’s a balance, like just about everything else. I think of one of my childhood neighbors, whose extremely nice parents were a fixture at 1980s football games with their giant video camera, capturing his performances drumming with the school band. They were pioneers in amateur documentarian parenting, and managing the balance between capturing the video and appreciating the moment. I see some of those videos surfacing on his Facebook page — he’s still a drummer — and know he appreciates their effort.

I’m sure my kids will some day be thankful that I captured their upbringing. I’d just want a few memories left over for myself as well. “Put down the @#$&ing phone.” Good advice from a very wise deer that may or may not have existed.

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog. Follow him on Twitter @PeterHartlaub. Friend the The Poop on Facebook.